Artists & Vandals

            Like any large city, Vancouver is covered in graffiti, from the small ornate signatures or “tags” in varying degrees of detail, to the larger pieces done by stencil or freehand that often add beauty to the city rather than defile it. What I find most intriguing about the city’s heavily graffiti-covered landscape are the train yards, particularly the one nearest to where I live in New Westminster along the Fraser River. While some pieces are explosions of colour and pattern, others are simpler, and call to mind vandalism before art. Interestingly, not all of these pieces originate here, and it is impossible to tell where exactly they came from. The pieces on trains provide an interesting contrast in that the vast majority are tags (though considerably more elaborate than a signature scribbled on a bus stop bench with a permanent marker) identifying the artist, and yet because they’re continually moving across the continent, the effect of anonymity remains. Kan quotes the artist Claes Oldenburg on trains, "You're standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America” (2001:21).

            As one author notes, “Graffiti has crossed the boundaries of street culture, youth culture, and the art community, and while this may be attractive to many artists it also places them in contradictory relationships. For the most part, they may see themselves as outsiders to conventional social structures” (Bowen 1999:22). The debate whether graffiti is defacement or art is ongoing, but for some, it is their primary method of self-expression. The graffiti on the trains is unusual because it never becomes part of a community and the artists will always retain a degree of anonymity even after identifying themselves. Even in a cityscape, tagging serves more to identify the artist to other artists rather than to the general public: “The audience for graffiti is a random sampling of the general public who happen to see it in passing. Often, the participants considered other graffiti artists to be their primary audience and viewed the public as a secondary audience” (Bowen 1999:33). Beyond the local graffiti community, a lot of street art is community-based in one sense or another. Recently, along West Broadway, an anonymous artist has been tagging “False Creek” in a formal script, making reference to one Vancouver neighbourhood in another. A piece of graffiti commonly found in bathroom stalls and the sides of buildings is “native pride,” a notion that had been extended to a more formal setting, a legal mural on the side of another West Broadway building. The artists (or vandals, depending on how everything is interpreted, though Bowens contests that “defining graffiti as either art or vandalism is too simple” [1999:35]) either identify themselves as just that, artists, or else identify themselves in a more general sense, as part of a community, as was just described.

            An issue of Discorder, UBC’s music magazine, included an interview with a well-known street artist who only submitted to being interviewed if he could remain anonymous (unfortunately, I cannot track down the exact issue). Thus, even though he uses his name in tagging or includes it in his other art, he was virtually unknown by name in mainstream society, but notable in the street art community. A tag doesn’t truly serve as identification to someone outside that community, as they’re often similar to a performer’s stage name; while these two spheres overlap, the artist has separate identities in each.

            Through conducting interviews with several Toronto graffiti artists, Bowen found that “for many young artists, self-expression is highly valued as a right, much the same as freedom of speech” (1999:26). Unfortunately, their chosen means of expression is illegal and there are many people who don’t appreciate it, but condemn it. Through their artistic expression, the artists have a limited ability for truly identifying themselves for fear of coming into contact with the law. The colourful trains that pass through B.C. bypass this to an extent because identity becomes less obvious when the canvas is always traveling; however, their nature causes the artists to forgo a local community and extend the reach of their art to communities across the country, and perhaps continent.